Americans have asked
why Congressional Republicans continued to defend President Trump’s secret
relationship with Putin and their collision in last year’s elections, and these
massive Super PAC donations could help explain why.

The Dallas News just
issued a stunning report based on public records recently uncovered by
the Democratic Coalition, that the Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and
Senate Majority leader McConnell have taken a Putin-connected billionaire
Blavatnik’s cash:

Donald Trump and the political action
committees for Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John
Kasich and John McCain accepted $7.35 million in contributions from a
Ukrainian-born oligarch who is the business partner of two of Russian president
Vladimir Putin’s favorite oligarchs and a Russian government bank.

During the 2015-2016 election season,
Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonid “Len” Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to
leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators.

Mitch McConnell was the
top recipient of Blavatnik’s donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate
Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik’s holding companies, Access
Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission
documents and OpenSecrets.org.

Len Blavatnik
now owns Warner
Group Music and has become a
pillar of the Republican Party’s donor class, but many of his billions
come from windfall profits on a Russian oil deal personally
orchestrated by Vladimir Putin.

In the last election,
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) received over
$8 million dollars from McConnell’s Super PAC in last year’s election. He later
became part of Trump’s transition team and is now heading the Senate’s investigation
into Russian election interference.

His Access Industries
partnered to win a privatization auction of a state-run oil company in 2003
with Alfa Bank’s Mikhail Fridman and Victor Vekselberg, who is coincidentally
the largest
shareholder in Bank of
Cyprus which Trump Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross built into a
rogue’s gallery.

The three men formed
AAR partners, got an insider’s deal based on their access to Putin to buy an
oil company called TNK and partner with BP.

Privatization
deals in Russia like these are considered a form of public corruption since they
deliver great state-owned wealth to a connected few, and sometimes only take
small loans back in exchange for gushers of money from oil companies.

After the Russian oil
money flowed, rich dividends piled up for an entire decade until Putin ordered
Blavatnik and AAR to sell their shares to Rosneft when oil was at a high price,
$92 dollars a barrel 2013.

Luckily for Blavatnik
and company, they sold out to Putin at the very top of the market, but the
results for both Rosneft and Russia since then have
been disastrous:

Sechin and Putin’s mega-energy merger may have
seemed like a “good” strategic deal for Russia, but for Fridman, Vekselberg,
Blavatnik and Khan, whose combined net worth now hovers around $55 billion,
cashing out of Russia’s most oil-dependent company in the spring of 2013, with
West Texas Crude selling at $92 per barrel and Western banks pumping loans into
Russia, may go down as the most brilliantly timed profit-taking of the decade.

It also may have set off a chain of events in global financial markets that has
contributed to the collapse of Russia’s currency, which plummeted 40% against
the dollar in 2014. Putin’s state has been thrown into recession.

Putin was ecstatic. “This is a good big deal,
which is important not only for Russia’s energy sector but for the entire
Russian economy,” he said as the deal was being announced. Rosneft’s $55
billion TNK-BP purchase transformed it into the world’s biggest publicly traded
oil company and cemented Sechin’s position as a global energy czar, with Putin
presumably pulling the strings.

It’s important to
understand that many Russian oil billionaires aren’t allowed to cash out so
gracefully, and instead put on trial for bogus charges, stripped of their
wealth and imprisoned like Yukos
Oil’s former owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Only pro-Putin oligarchs are allowed to cash
out their Russian oil fortunes and legally take the money to a foreign country.

Following the money to
Republican donors is showing exactly how Vladimir Putin has used Russian oil
money to edge his way past Jesus in the GOP’s hierarchy of personalities.

The ties between the
GOP and Putin have grown so extremely close today, that one Congressional
Republican flew to Moscow
last year just to take orders from Putin’s cronies, and nobody in his caucus is doing a
thing about it.

Thought for the day

“Charlottesville is a great place that’s been very badly hurt over the last couple of days. I own, actually, one of the largest wineries in the United States. It is in Charlottesville.”

Donald Trump, responding to a question whether he would go to Charlottesville to offer support and comfort as so many Presidents have done in the past.

Quick fact check: Donald Trump does not own the winery; his idiot son Eric does under the name Eric Trump Wine Manufacturing LLC. And at 36,000 cases annual production, the winery is not even the largest winery in Virginia, never mind the United States.

Information and Feedback

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